The White King

by Leanda de Lisle

  James had named Essex his ‘martyr’ and leading members of Essex’s old war party had been placed in Prince Henry’s household. James had, however, shared Elizabeth’s fears concerning the expense of war.32 The Crown’s sources of income were still shrinking, and James was by nature extravagant. His experiences of violence and disorder in Scotland had, furthermore, shaped a determined conciliator. After James had signed a peace treaty with Spain in the summer of 1604, Prince Henry had become the focus of the war party’s hopes for the future. He had been a passionate advocate of a seaborne empire that would rival that of Spain. With Henry dead the old Elizabethan war party needed a new prince to look to.

  When Charles’s mother Anna died in 1619, she left her son aged eighteen, a still awkward teenager, as isolated at his father’s rumbustious court ‘as a planet in its sphere’.33 But the new Lord Admiral Buckingham stepped in to offer him a helping hand into the adult world. Intelligent and charming, the twenty-six-year-old favourite ‘understood the arts and artifices of a court, and all the learning that is professed there’.34 He was also able to mediate Charles’s relationship with James. The prince responded with gratitude and growing affection.

  In a letter of that year, Charles thanked Buckingham for smoothing out a quarrel with his father, and told him about an assignation he had with a woman ‘that must not be named’. With the physical energy that was characteristic of the Stuarts came a strong sex drive. James, however, took a strict line against mistresses, fearful that royal bastards could pose a threat to legitimate heirs. Charles’s unnamed woman had to be kept secret and Charles, with typical wit, asked Buckingham to leave his letter, once he had read it, in the ‘custody of Mr Vulcan’–in other words to burn it. He signed the letter simply ‘Your constant, loving friend, Charles’. Buckingham was the only non-royal person to whom he would ever sign himself with his Christian name alone.35

  James was delighted by the improvement in the relationship between his son and the man James would later call his ‘wife’. He told Charles his new friendship with Buckingham demonstrated ‘what reverent love you have towards me in your heart’. He also suggested it would be politically astute for Charles to keep Buckingham at his side as king, observing that those who had been loyal to his mother and predecessor Mary, Queen of Scots, had also proved to be amongst those most loyal to him.36

  James used Buckingham as his amanuensis as he wrote his last political tract, which he dedicated to Charles. ‘A pattern for a King’s Inauguration’ looked at the last days before Christ’s crucifixion and examined the rites of the coronation ceremony in light of this. James compared Charles’s future role to that of Christ the King. He told Charles he would be God’s image on earth and that his subjects would owe him a duty of obedience as to God. James warned, however, that ‘he must not expect a soft and easy crown, but a crown full of thorny cares’.37 It was a heartfelt comment. James’s thorny cares included debts of £900,000.

  Royal finances remained in urgent need of reform, but James’s profligacy with gifts and pensions–not least for Buckingham–had convinced his parliaments that his financial woes were of his own making. James responded by cultivating independent means of raising money. In particular he extended the raising of customs duties under his prerogative powers–that is, those powers exclusive to him as a monarch. But the money the duties raised only allowed James’s financial survival in peacetime. He could not afford to go to war without Parliament’s financial backing–and there would be a political cost to James for any money they raised for him.

  It was with trepidation therefore that James saw that the Anglo-Spanish peace was being threatened by a new conflict in Europe. A war had begun in 1618 when the Holy Roman Emperor had curtailed the religious freedoms of Protestants in Bohemia and they, in turn, had appealed to other Protestants for help. The sighting of a ‘star with a tail’ would be remembered as a warning of what was coming: ‘lamentable wastings, barbarous destructions of countries and cities’.38 By the time the war was over, thirty years later, parts of the Continent would have lost three-quarters of their population to battle, expulsions, hunger and disease. The Stuart kingdoms could not be immune from the passions it generated, and the fate of Charles’s sister lay at the heart of Europe’s tragedy.

  * People believed God had created peace and order from chaos when the cosmos was born. He created a perfect hierarchy–the Chain of Being. This placed mankind above animals on earth and above angels in heaven. The devil rebelled against this and sought to return the universe to chaos. He tempted the first woman, Eve, to rebel against God and she brought suffering and disharmony into the world.

  * The teachings the Puritans were most anxious to drum home began with the Calvinist teaching on predestination: that God has chosen ‘elect’ individuals for heaven, in return for faith, while everyone else goes to hell. Puritans referred to themselves as the ‘Godly’, by which they meant the ‘elect’. Although no good you did on earth could make you one of the elect, Puritans followed a ‘pilgrim’s progress’ that brought them some reassurance that they were amongst the chosen. This involved shunning the society of the impious, being fastidious in attention to moral detail, and spending hours in prayer and listening to sermons. This gained access to God’s grace, and through grace you gained faith and could be ‘born again’ as a Christian to live a holier life. Eventually your journey would reach the final stage of ‘glorification’, when you ‘knew’ you were one of the saved.

  2

  BECOMING KING

  ON 7 NOVEMBER 1619, A PREGNANT ELIZABETH STUART WAS PROCESSED to the high altar at St Vitus Cathedral in Prague. She was attended for her coronation by blue- and violet-clothed Bohemian clergy and was bestowed with the crown of St Elizabeth, a circlet of double arches surmounted by a cross. Anna of Denmark had been disappointed when her daughter had been married to a mere Elector of the Palatinate. Now, eight months after Anna’s death, Elizabeth’s husband Frederick was King of Bohemia and she was his crowned consort. For how long his reign would continue remained to be seen. Frederick had accepted the throne at the hands of Calvinist rebels against the Habsburg Holy Roman Emperor, despite his father-in-law King James’s strong advice. Frederick’s enemies had warned that his reign would vanish with the snows of winter. The following September, 1620, Habsburg armies made ready to fulfil that promise and advanced on Prague.

  Elizabeth sent her ‘only dear brother’ Charles a desperate plea to ‘move his majesty [King James] that now he would assist us’.1 Charles responded as his martial brother Prince Henry would surely have done. He promised her £10,000 of his own revenue, and offered to lead a military expedition in person. James forbad it. In November 1620 Habsburg forces defeated Frederick at the Battle of White Mountain and Elizabeth fled Prague with Cossack horsemen at her heels. Legend has it her new baby, Prince Rupert of the Rhine, was almost left behind, tossed into her carriage at the last minute, the swaddling unravelling at her feet. The lower Palatine territories of the Rhineland were also soon lost, overrun by Spanish Habsburg forces in alliance with their Austrian cousins. Elizabeth and Frederick were forced into exile in The Hague, the capital of the rebel Calvinist Dutch Republic. The Habsburg prophecy had come to pass. Frederick’s short reign had earned Charles’s sister no more than the bitter sobriquet ‘the Winter Queen’.

  Thousands were now being killed in Bohemia. Protestant worship was banned, while the Palatinate had been given to the Catholic Maximilian of Bavaria for services to the Habsburg cause. With the Protestant states of Germany and the Netherlands still at war with both the Habsburgs and the ‘Catholic League’, under Maximilian, it seemed only a matter of time before the Lutheran kingdoms of Scandinavia and Calvinist Britain were drawn into the conflict. James persisted, however, in seeking a diplomatic solution to the crisis.

  James believed he could persuade the Habsburgs to withdraw from the Palatinate as part of a marriage alliance between Charles and the infanta Maria of Spain. An additional benefit would be a huge do
wry that would help free James from financial dependence on Parliament. In return, James would offer the Habsburgs an alliance against their Continental rivals the French. But first James had to convince the Habsburgs that, if they refused his offer, he would fight a war against them. To this end he called a parliament in 1621 and asked for the subsidies he would need.

  James’s MPs instead demanded that Charles marry a Protestant. James was outraged that the Commons saw fit to encroach on a decision that fell under the royal prerogative. Indeed, when they also attacked his raising of customs duties outside parliamentary control, it seemed to him they had left no aspect of royal sovereignty ‘unattempted but the striking of coin’.2 He dissolved Parliament, but Puritans in particular continued to attack the Spanish match as an alliance with forces of Satan.

  Elizabeth I was portrayed as having been a paragon of warlike intent against Spain and the myth was used as a means of criticising the peace-loving James. The martial Prince Henry, meanwhile, was remembered as her true heir. There were posthumous advantages to Henry’s reputation in having lived long enough to embody great hopes, and not so long as to have had the opportunity to disappoint them. With Charles seen as James’s dutiful son, the old war party even sought a legal basis for an alternative dynasty to the Stuarts from amongst junior descendants of the Tudors.3

  In the face of this Puritan opposition to peace, James began to actively favour anti-Puritan clergy within the Church of England.* To his dismay, however, the Spanish were slow to respond to his overtures. As the marriage negotiations dragged on, and anxious to help his sister, Charles decided the answer was to cross Europe incognito and break the deadlock by winning the infanta in person. There was a proverb Charles quoted, ‘Few great talkers are good doers’.4 His father was a good talker, but Charles wanted to take action. Buckingham encouraged Charles in his project, although others feared the prince could be kidnapped in Spain, or even killed.

  Charles was of an age when he wished to develop an identity separate from his father. The danger for Buckingham in this was that when Charles became king he might signal his independence by swiftly retiring his father’s favourite. There would certainly be pressure on Charles to do so.

  The 1621 parliament had seen the revival of the medieval practice of ‘impeachment’, whereby royal officials accused of criminal behaviour were tried and punished by Parliament. It had been used successfully against James’s Lord Chancellor, Francis Bacon, and Buckingham feared he could be next. He was deeply resented for his monopoly of power, ‘managing his glory to the eclipse of other great men’.* There was also anxiety about the nature of his relationship with the king. It was said that in Europe ‘men talked familiarly’ of James’s unnatural love for Buckingham, that ‘the sin of sodomy’ was now frequent in London, where ‘boys grown to the height of wickedness’ painted their faces like women, and that the whole realm was at risk of divine punishment.5 Buckingham needed royal protection in the next reign, and so made himself integral to Charles’s first solo political venture, backing it to the hilt with the king. Buckingham told James that Charles’s plan would put the Spanish on the spot, and that James had ‘once for all to know what satisfaction they were like to have in the business of the Palatinate’.6

  It was with James’s extremely reluctant agreement that the venturous knights left for Paris, where they had their adventures at the Louvre and Charles saw Henrietta Maria for the first time, before riding on to Spain. Avoiding wolves and (with more difficulty) duels, they arrived in Madrid on 7 March 1623.

  Charles and Buckingham passed suburban palaces with beautiful gardens and rode on down streets of great houses with plain brick facades embellished only with granite doorways and iron balconies. A travel book of the period observed that while Parisians walked ‘so quickly and actively that they look as though the law were after them’, here in Madrid the ‘calm and repose’ of the Spanish was such that ‘any who saw them, will think that they have just recovered from a serious illness’.7 There was rather less repose in Madrid, however, when the astonishing news broke of Charles’s arrival.

  Their Habsburg king, the seventeen-year-old Philip IV, was treated as a living icon. Tall and fair-haired, with the undershot jaw that was a feature of the family’s inbreeding, he was rarely seen in public.8 Most of the time he was kept screened from the world by a barrier of protocol, jealously guarded by an elect group of nobles and officials. Diplomats who were invited to see him in the gloomy Moorish fortress of the Alcazar were escorted through a succession of dark but richly furnished rooms to an audience chamber where they would find the young king standing alone by a small console table. He would raise his hat in greeting, then remain still and silent while the diplomat spoke.9 A few polite words from the king would then conclude the audience. Any visiting princes had to be greeted with even greater formality to protect the divine image of monarchy. They weren’t expected to bound into town, hoping to throw themselves at the feet of Philip’s carefully chaperoned sister.

  The teenage Philip was shocked, but also excited, to discover he was to entertain a Prince of Wales. When Philip had become king two years earlier, he confessed he had found himself quite unprepared for his duties, adrift in a ‘sea of confusions and ocean of difficulties’.10 He knew Charles was highly educated, an accomplished horseman, and a young man of taste. He wanted to both learn from him and impress him.

  Philip had recently introduced an entirely black court dress, worn unadorned save for a small white standing collar. He decided to relax this code. He would not go so far as to wear colour but, in honour of Charles’s visit, his suits were sewn with gold thread and rich jewels. The personal encounters Charles had wanted with the infanta Maria were not permitted, but he was given a suite of rooms in the Alcazar. A household was also appointed for him and he was waited on in a manner unknown at the English court since the days of the Tudors.

  James had introduced to England the relaxed style of the Scottish court where he would chat to those around him while he ate. In Madrid noblemen served Charles on their knees, and watched him take his food almost as if they were witnessing Holy Communion. Charles saw in image and ritual what his father had written on the theory and nature of divine kingship. He was impressed, and, as the summer heat fell on Madrid like a weighty blanket, days turned to weeks and weeks to months.

  Philip’s court, despite its formalities, was also one of glitter and liveliness. There were fireworks, bullfights, torchlit processions and chivalric games, in which Philip appeared splendidly arrayed, commanding squadrons of horses. There were balls too, ballets and plays, which incorporated elaborate theatrical machines that allowed quick and dramatic changes of scenery. Above all, however, there was art. This was Spain’s golden age and Charles wanted to grab all it had to offer. He purchased Renaissance works by Titian, Raphael and many others. He had an exceptional eye as a collector, investing in the cutting edge of modern art as well as old masters. Only eighteen months later Peter Paul Rubens would call Charles ‘the greatest student of art among the princes of the world’.11 Buckingham–whom James made a duke in May–shared Charles’s tastes and was the perfect companion in this regard.

  The Spanish were shocked, nevertheless, to see how Buckingham would sit while the prince stood, and even leave his hat on, the two men calling each other ‘ridiculous names’. It was as if they were ordinary brothers rather than prince and servant. James had, perhaps unintentionally, encouraged this–they were his ‘babies’, although of them Buckingham was ‘my bastard brat’.12 Philip’s leading minister, the Count of Olivarez, expressed concern that if the infanta married Charles and did not immediately put a stop to this ‘unsuitable licence’ then ‘she would herself experience its mischievous consequences’.13 It was not to come to that, however, as it became evident that the religious differences between Charles and Maria were too great for any marriage to take place. The Habsburg infanta, as pink-cheeked and full-lipped as a German doll, believed that marrying a Protestant would imperil h
er soul, while Charles angrily rejected the efforts Philip made to convert him to Catholicism.

  In October 1623 Charles and Buckingham returned to England. The nation was relieved that Charles was safe and remained Protestant. Church bells rang and cheering crowds lined the roads from Portsmouth to London to greet the prince’s return. But he had been left angered by the failure of the trip to Madrid. It appeared to Charles that Buckingham had been correct in suggesting that the Spanish had all the while been stringing his father–and himself–along, and taken them for fools.

  Buckingham, meanwhile, wrote to James to tell him how he was looking forward to their reunion, and promised never to part from him again. He was ‘only bent’, he said, on having James’s ‘leg soon in my arms’.14 The collapse of the Spanish match would, nevertheless, now open up a rift with the peace-seeking king. Buckingham’s months with Charles, and the stress of the marriage negotiations, had forged a deep loyalty in the prince for his friend, and Buckingham continued to groom his affections. Charles had given up on his father’s dream of a Spanish match, but he had not given up his intention to help his sister. If the Palatinate were not to be regained by peace, then, Charles believed, it must be regained by war.

  The Winter Queen and her children were Charles’s heirs. If her eldest son ever inherited the Stuart kingdoms, then the Palatinate would belong to the English and Scottish crowns. For Charles, its restoration to Elizabeth’s husband was a dynastic imperative and a national duty. While Charles pressed his father to plan for military conflict with the Habsburgs, Buckingham, once again, backed his policy and piled further pressure on the king.